Prose So Bad “A Sort of Grandeur Creeps Into It”

Like the Missouri River in flood, the vast outpouring of media coverage leading up to the inauguration of Barack Obama on Tuesday has room for almost everything, including the inaugural address of Warren G. Harding, widely regarded as the worst example of this singularly American speech genre. Harding’s oratorical style inspired one of H.L. Mencken’s nastiest barbs:

“I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and a half dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and “doodle. It is balder and dash.”

Everyone and his brother quotes this quote and none of them seem to document its source. Mencken wrote it in “Gamalielese” published originally in The Baltimore Sun on March 7, 1921 and available now in On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe. When time permits, I’ll search Project Gutenberg’s Mencken holdings to see if it’s published in the public domain there.

The Warren G. Harding Wikipedia page explains that Mencken coined the term “Gamalielese” to refer to Harding’s distinctive style, “a mocking reference to Harding’s middle name rather than a reference to any of the Biblical characters named Gamaliel.” See ComingAnarchy.com for more on this rarifiedargot.

2 Responses to Prose So Bad “A Sort of Grandeur Creeps Into It”

Every record for confounding, meandering, adolescent, narcissistic, narrow-minded, conceited, barbarous, grandiose, cute prose has been broken over the past 8 years. The bar has never been set low enough so that Bush cannot go beneath it. His speeches deserve showers of shoes.

Letting Go of Sight

I’ve canoed on Lake Superior for almost as many years as I’ve been losing eyesight. I return year after year like a migrating loon to learn the other side of a slow, uncertain process that we could call “going blind.” After 35 years with the lake as my teacher, I know what lies on the other side. I call it letting go of sight. Read Big Water. See more about the Great Lakes.

Not This Pig

If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in Not This Pig (2003).

Media in Transition @ MiT

Disabled Americans today have to negotiate for the kinds of accommodations made for FDR, and the caveat “reasonable accommodation” is built into the law. President Franklin Roosevelt did not have to negotiate. He could summon vast resources of the federal government – money as well as brains – to accomplish the work of disability. And it was accomplished with such thoroughness and efficiency that its scale could be called the Accessibility-Industrial Complex had it been directed toward public accommodations and not solely the needs of a single man. Read FDR and the Hidden Work of Disability [MiT8 2013]

Shepard Fairey claimed that his posterization of a copyrighted AP news photo of Barack Obama was a transformative work protected by the fair use doctrine. In other words, it was a shape-shifter. I claim fair use, too, when I reproduce and transform copyrighted works into media formats that are accessible to me as a blind reader. Read Shape-Shifters in the Fair Use Lab [MiT6 2009]

The social engineers who created a system for licensing beggars in New York never imagined that a blind woman had culture or could make culture. She herself may not have imagined it, either. In the moment when Paul Strand photographed her surreptitiously on the street in 1916, he could not have expected that one day blind photographers would reverse the camera’s gaze. Read Curiosity & The Blind Photographer. [MiT5 2007]